bitchy | Nicholas Witchell: The Palace should have tried harder to work with the Sussexes

Nicholas Witchell was the BBC’s royal correspondent for 25 years, and he retired this week, on Christmas Day. Ahead of his retirement, he sat down with Roya Nikkhah at the Times of London to talk about the Windsors, the role of royal reporting and of course the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Witchell went viral in 2019, on the day Prince Archie was born, because Witchell, doing a live BBC link-up, lost his train of thought completely and stammered around, trying to avoid saying “the first mixed race child in the royal family.” Witchell’s interview got a lot of headlines this week but really, he’s just saying what most royal reporters have said a million times. Some highlights from this interview:

They can’t ignore the Sussex saga: “You cannot ignore Harry and Meghan and that story, however tedious at times it may become. We’ve fully reported the split, the biography and all the other machinations of it. There have been soap opera aspects to the royal family for a long time and an appetite for the tittle-tattle, scandal end of reporting. It’s not an aspect I feel at home with, but I recognise it is part of the job.”

His viral moment in 2019, when Archie was born: “That was my worst single moment in 48 years. Drying up in front of the audience live on the telly. It was about Harry and Meghan and maybe subconsciously I just wasn’t that interested… I’ve obviously asked myself what went wrong. I was tired, you need to wind yourself up to stand there and do that, and I hadn’t. I was complacent, you cannot be complacent about live television because if you are, as I demonstrated in front of however many million people, it can bite you.” The public were mostly kind and he received letters of support from actors who had dried up on stage. “I’ve never been able to watch it and it shook my confidence quite a bit.”

His thoughts on the Sussexit: “I think probably it was always going to happen because he was looking for a way out and he perceived her [Meghan] as being the route out from a life that, as we now discover, he had never felt entirely comfortable with — a life to which psychologically I think he was not suited. Should the Palace have tried harder? Yes. In different hands, might it have handled things differently? Yes. I think by that stage the Queen was the age she was and would have found it difficult to understand the anguish Harry was going through.”

He dismisses the Sussexes’ narrative that the Palace machine was against them from the start. He praises their team of unstuffy courtiers — Samantha Cohen, a punchy Australian who served as their private secretary, and the equally punchy Americans Jason Knauf and Sara Latham, who both worked as their communications secretaries. “That team bent over backwards to accommodate them and to be in sympathy with her [Meghan]. Not one of them was the archetypal Buckingham Palace courtier and if anyone was going to carry it off, that team would have done so. Meghan is clearly a very intelligent, articulate, ambitious woman, and you would have thought she would have appreciated the fact that these people were working so hard to make it work.”

Meghan & the culture clash: “It was hugely complex, but I think there was a clash of cultures. I really don’t think race was a significant factor in it, I think it was more nationality and culture than it was race. But I must recognise that I’m an elderly white male — of course that colours my outlook on the world — and it clearly is not how she or they saw things. It’s a huge loss to the royal family, when you think what they might have done had they been prepared to try harder and give it more time. If she had perhaps just been less impatient, less inclined to see well-meaning people as being in some way against her. It’s sad, particularly the relationship [breakdown] between Harry and William.”

He has sympathy for Harry after reading Spare: “I hadn’t fully appreciated the degree to which he was struggling with his mental health until I read Spare.”

But he hates Harry’s battles against the press: “I think they’re misjudged, misguided, a touch paranoid — there is nothing to be gained from them. There is no doubt at all that he, like other members of the royal family, has been badly treated by the media on occasions. But I think they’ve [Harry and Meghan] been overly sensitive. They are public figures, they make use of the media. So they should be more prepared to take the knocks with the positive moments. But that’s not their way. I think their focus has become so narrow and is so suffused with this sense of paranoia that they are failing to recognise the bigger picture, the opportunities that they have. They’re obsessed, he is certainly obsessed, with the way the media portrays him. Unhealthily so.”

His thoughts on William & Kate: “He’s fulfilling a difficult role with considerable skill, panache and commitment — as is his wife. They are capturing public sentiment in a very positive way, I think their image is a good one, they both care very much to do it correctly and to do positive things, to find areas of relevance.” Referring to their work on homelessness, the environment and mental health, he says: “Their commitment to the various causes that they’ve taken to their hearts strikes a chord with the British people. Not everyone, not in all parts of the United Kingdom, but I think they are doing a difficult job as well as anyone could.”

[From The Times]

This is always so hilarious to me: “I think it was more nationality and culture than it was race.” We don’t hate her because she’s Black, we hate her because she’s American! They think that’s a winning argument, that they were on Meghan’s throat from the jump because she’s an American but of course it was never about race, nevermind all of the racist dog-whistles and dehumanization, lies and racist scorn. “If she had perhaps just been less impatient, less inclined to see well-meaning people as being in some way against her.” Kate lied and told everyone that Meghan made her cry. KP staffers were calling her ME-gain and Degree Wife. William’s press secretary sold out the Sussexes in exchange for burying the Rose Hanbury story. But Meghan was just so impatient! She saw the worst in people! His comments about Harry’s press lawsuits are interesting, in that they indicate (once again) that the British media acts as a cartel, and that includes the BBC.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.